The Threeness of the World (3/6)

Popper, Harris, Guattari, Archer, Henriques

Threeness is often an answer to the problems posed by oneness and twoness. One thing struggles to explain everything, and the relationship between two things often makes little sense without at least a third thing as a conceptual mediator. I find it fascinating how this pattern plays out in so many ways. How, when, and why do we reach out for threeness?

My politics tutor Larry Seidentop said that to understand a theorist, we should ask who their enemy is. If there is no clear enemy we should at least take time to understand the problem they are trying to solve. In what follows I consider five theorists of threeness, indicate what those theories are responding to, and show how threeness manifests differently depending on the academic discipline, professional practice and historical context. This post is relatively academic in spirit, but it’s important, to me at least, and I do indicate its political relevance as I go. If you survive the experience of reading it, the next three posts will be juicier from a moral and spiritual perspective. What follows is like broccoli - it’s good for us, and I’ve added the textual equivalent of kewpie deep-roasted sesame dressing to make it taste better.

This mini-series on threeness arose because I am creating a course where I have a whole week dedicated to the threeness of the world. I do not yet have an extended written description of where Perspectiva’s emphasis on “systems, souls and society” came from, and it is time to create it. I wrote the first two posts without knowing how to structure the case. The first was mostly about how I see metaphysics with Taoism as a special guest, and the second was metatheory about the reality of maps and territories. I did not initially see a clear way through the terrain, but I do now. That means, mercifully, I can also see the way out.

In this third post, we are in ontological and epistemological terrain - studying what exists and how we might know it. I briefly consider five different justificatory systems that rely on threeness from within analytic philosophy(Popper), Cultural Anthropology(Harris), Social Ecology(Guattari), Sociology(Archer) and Metapsychology(Henriques). Then, next time, I’ll shift register to what Plato and latterly Habermas have to say about the value spheres of the good, the beautiful and the true (part four). Then I’ll consider religious and mystical threeness with Bourgeault’s law of three as a focus (part five) and then ask what ‘systems, souls, and society’ means after looking back on all that (part six). Then I’ll spend at least three weeks in The Maldives.

So please be assured, The Joyous Struggle will not forever be stuck in a loop of threeness, and we should be done with all this within, say, twenty-one days.

Karl Popper’s Inter-Objectivity: World I, World II, World III

In 1978, roughly a year after I was born, Karl Popper delivered one of The Tanner Lectures, at the University of Michigan. He called it Three Worlds and he opens the lecture as follows:

In this lecture I intend to challenge those who uphold a monist or even a dualist view of the universe; and I will propose, instead, a pluralist view. I will propose a view of the universe that recognizes at least three different but interacting sub-universes…There is, first, the world that consists of physical bodies: of stones and of stars; of plants and of animals; but also of radiation, and of other forms of physical energy. I will call this physical world ‘world 1’…There is, secondly, the mental or psychological world, the world of our feelings of pain and of pleasure, of our thoughts, of our decisions, of our perceptions and our observations; in other words, the world of mental or psychological states or processes, or of subjective experiences. I will call it ‘world 2’. World 2 is immensely important, especially from a human point of view or from a moral point of view…My main argument will be devoted to the defence of the reality of what I propose to call ‘world 3’. By world 3 I mean the world of the products of the human mind, such as languages; tales and stories and religious myths; scientific conjectures or theories, and mathematical constructions; songs and symphonies; paintings and sculptures. But also aeroplanes and airports and other feats of engineering…

Popper had enemies and he even wrote a book about them. The Open Society and its Enemies bunches together Plato, Hegel and Marx and rails against the perils of Utopian thinking, untestable philosophies and grand theories of history that often lead to war or the gulag. Popper insists that a spirit of enduring open-ended epistemic inquiry rather than any once-and-for-all theoretical model is to key to enduring human freedom, and this idea animates many decades of intellectual output. Popper wrote the book that defined his career during the Second World War from the relative safety of New Zealand. He believed the book needed to be written and published urgently, to save the world from the totalitarianism that he felt lurked within each of these thinkers who were still shaping world events. The book had its detractors, but also a huge impact.

Fears of totalitarianism made sense in 1945 and they make sense again today, but in a lecture ostensibly about philosophy in 1978, what’s Popper’s problem? The connection between Popper’s open society political philosophy and his epistemology is quite beautiful when you see it, and it’s about the reality of World 3.

Popper’s problem is that he believes in a world that values questions, and questions answers but he can’t see how to ground it ontologically or epistemically with the prevailing intellectual fashions of his day. He can’t find it in the monism of matter - because it offers law-like answers only; nor in monism of mind which cannot escape its self-referential discourse; nor can he find it in a dualism that can’t explain how mind is derived from matter or how they continue to interact. Instead, he looks to what he values in the institutions of science and democracy and seeks to argue that their reality is no less real than matter or mind.

Popper notices that this reality he cares about is derived from both matter and mind but it has a reality that cannot be reduced to either. Einstein’s E=Mc2 is neither a physical item in the world nor a subjective experience, so what is it? The world is full of things created by humans that exist and function through collective recognition and yet, and this is crucial for Popper, they also seem to have an objective reality that does not depend on it. He refers to World 3 as an inter-objective world, which is a weird term, but very important. World 3 is ‘inter’ because humans create and uphold it together but it is ‘objective’ in the sense that it is grounded in reason, does not have subjective interiority and can exist regardless of whether we are perceiving it. World 3 is not just ‘ideas’ but the place where ideas are tested for their validity. A book for instance is a physical object made of paper in World 1, an experience of reading in World 2, but it is also part of a living culture for humans in World 3.

Moreover, at a time when many argue renewal depends on being post-human, on recognising our profound entanglement with nature and increasingly with emergent or artificial intelligence, World 3 is unique to humans and a place for humans; it is what sets us apart.

World 3 is currently under attack in the USA in attempts to undermine the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. World 3 - the place where we collectively interrogate the truth as if the answer mattered to all of us - is what Steve Bannon was attacking when he advised his acolytes to ‘flood the zone with shit’. World 3 is the inter-objective world where we test ideas for their objective truth in World 1 and their subjective meaning in World 2. World 3 is where the battle for trustworthy information which is the lifeblood of democracy has to be continually fought and won.

Consider Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa:

An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the universal declaration of human rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts. We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century while regulating and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.

Ressa’s language is beautiful and it is searingly relevant today. I share it here because she is, in essence, speaking of the importance of World 3. Ressa is saying what Popper said decades before: unless we recognise and protect our arenas of inter-objective reality - shared and even sanctified spaces set aside for free and fair inquiry to establish facts - we will fall deeper into chaos and delusion.

Marvin Harris’s Cultural Materialism: Infrastructure, (social) Structure, Superstructure

Marvin Harris is an anthropologist and author of a field-creating book called Cultural Materialism published in 1979, a year after Popper’s Tanner lecture, and it’s a hefty tome propping up my laptop as I write. While I have known about Popper since the late nineties, I only came upon Harris when I noticed around 2022 that Daniel Schmachtenger kept referring to “infrastructure, structure and superstructure”. This trio refers to the relationship between the technological and economic base of society (infrastructure), relations of creation and production (social structure which Harris sometimes unhelpfully calls ‘structure’) and culture, norms, values, metaphysics, religion (superstructure).

As far as I can tell, Harris is trying to temper Marx’s economic determinism by moving away from the ‘economic base determines cultural superstructure’ claim with a more fluid analysis that says culture is shaped by many things that all have some material basis, including social structure, ecology, demographics and technology. He says little about class struggle, so it’s as if he’s trying to bring Marx’s historical materialism into anthropology through a filter to make it more palatable.

Harris believes that material conditions shape the world. Much that appears to be driven by something other than ‘infrastructure’ often stems from a material need or aspiration in disguise. He is known for arguing that sacred cows in Hinduism are only ‘sacred’ because they are too economically valuable to be killed, and, similarly, that cannabilism among the Aztecs was driven not by a need for ritual slaughter but by protein deficiency. You have to admire his chutzpah. Harris has examined these cases more closely than I have, but be assured that not everyone agrees with him. His writing is trenchant and impressive in some ways - he is an intellectual assassin par excellence, full of statements like the following:

Principles of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the form of domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determine the form of the behavioral and mental superstructure.
- (Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, 1979)

On reflection, Marvin Harris is not my cup of tea. His work feels too reductionist and totalising to inspire trust, and he effectively ignores individual interiority and agency. In the preface to Cultural Materialism, it becomes clear that Harris’s enemies are “mystification and obscurantism in contemporary social science”, but I’ve heard some version of that quasi-positivist complaint before. Harris’s problem is the lack of scientific status for his discipline, anthropology, and his ‘enemies’ are the kinds of interpretative or symbolic anthropological theorists people love(!) like Clifford Geertz who sees anthropology as being closer to a form of literature than a science (“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun.”).

I include Harris here partly because if he’s right, then the major determinant of our world-historical moment is technology in general, and perhaps AI in particular, and there are many who think that. Even if he is right about that however, it doesn’t follow that what we need is primarily different technology, or a new economy. In fact, considering Harri’s threefold structure helped me understand myself and Perspectiva’s purpose better, though in a curious and roundabout way.

As an undergraduate back in the late nineties, I learned that a key debate within Marxism is whether major societal change stems primarily from the economic base (system!) or the cultural superstructure (souls!) and that the answer to that depends to an extent of on the social structure (society!) and the extent to which it is aware of itself in ‘class consciousness’, particularly whether classes ‘in-themselves’ could become classes ‘for-themselves’. Jean Paul Sartre later developed this latter issue as the problem of serialisation which is relevant to the challenge of field formation in the post-conventional community which informs my work. But I had forgotten all about it.

When I became aware of this debate again, it was quite a shock to realise that in my work for Perspectiva over the last decade, I had been unwittingly responding to Marx.

What prompted my initial interest in bringing spiritual questions into public policy debate around 2011 was noticing that we lacked the imaginative and creative resources to contend with the ecological, economic and political problems we have created for ourselves. The social imaginary we were caught up in felt exhausted, partly because too many of the doors to different kinds of cosmologies were locked, too many hidden spiritual resources that were not permissible to contend with in the public realm. All available intellectual energy went on discussing the economic base and took the cultural superstructure for granted, or paid lip service to it, and that's partly because the postmodern culture of the time did not feel generative (people were too busy watching Seinfeld). My growing conviction, in Popper’s terms, was that we needed World 3 to remember the importance of World 2.

In recent years I have faced the opposite challenge. Today I often work with people who over-emphasise the need for a new collective imaginary. Even a brilliant mind like Iain McGilchrist’s is, with the greatest of respect, sociologically ambivalent. And when I met Jordan Peterson, I challenged him to articulate his sociological vision, which he doesn’t have. Many smart people distrust changes to the economic base and somewhat over-emphasise (in my view) the relative importance of changes in superstructure i.e. the perception and appreciation of certain kinds of disposition and culture. They tend to say that what matters is the quality of perception lies behind or within a particular social or political vision. I have some sympathy for that, but I also feel it places too much emphasis on one aspect of reality.

This discussion matters because effective collective action at scale needs to involve the co-arising of changes in three worlds - I believe this idea becomes self-evident to anyone who thinks deeply about the possibility of transformative social change. There is however an important strategic question about their relative importance, which is where Marvin Harris’s almost exclusive emphasis on infrastructure (‘systems change’ or changing ‘Big Tech’) poses an interesting challenge.

On this interpretation and extrapolation of Harris, Big Tech is now a defining aspect of a broader pattern of, let’s say, rentier extractive capitalism (infrastructure/system) that is atomising society, creating cultural polarisation and undermining civic capacity (social structure/society) leading to alienation, anxiety, loneliness and depression (superstructure/soul). Some hope to change the technology/economy for instance through regulation or a new government, and thereby to change the social structure, which in turn will change our subjective states where joy and suffering arise. Yet others believe a countervailing direction of influence is necessary because a full frontal attack on infrastructure will be too easily repelled. For instance, an educational renaissance may begin to form online with offline sites (society) offering transformative aesthetic, civic and cultural education or Bildung at scale (souls); and that may co-arise with peer-to-peer cosmo-local production fuelled by renewable energy or bioregional regeneration combined somehow with relatively benign versions of AI and/or Web 3.0 (systems) giving rise to meaning, purpose, solidarity, friendship and love…

Sounds good! But how is anything like that going to happen? It seems to me that it can only happen if the changes somehow co-arise and inform and empower each other. Otherwise, each of the different changes will lack the power to establish themselves before countervailing forces with different priorities take hold – before systems of structures of various kinds (regardless of your model) ensure that our immunity to change kicks in. As argued previously through the three-horizons model, only a robust movement coalescing around an H2plus method will keep us out of the H2minus vortex. This is the work, and why we need new methods, supported by a new field, informed by work in the three worlds. That’s my day job.

Felix Guattari’s Ecosophy: The environment, social relations, human subjectivity.

Moving forward ten years, and shifting away from the Anglosphere, there is a form of foundational threeness in Felix Guattari(1930-1992), a French social theorist somewhat overshadowed by his better-known intellectual collaborator Gilles Deleuze. I don’t know this oeuvre well, but I have read The Three Ecologies, published in French in 1989 just three years before Guattari died.

While Harris largely ignores and neglects subjectivity, Guattari makes it central. In The Three Ecologies Guattari’s enemy is, as it had been throughout his scholarship, capitalist modernity broadly conceived, particularly how it homogenises subjectivity by fostering conformity and delimiting desire. He also targets the kind of environmentalism that thinks it is enough to care about ‘nature’ and leave everything else untouched. Perhaps his signature line from The Three Ecologies is:

We cannot simply protect nature while allowing capitalism to destroy social relations and subjectivity. A true ecology is threefold: environmental, social, and mental.
- (The Three Ecologies, 1989)

Guattari sees the world falling apart not merely the destruction of nature, but because of our misplaced ideas and perceptions and due to the breakdown of generative solidarities, and and you can’t blame him. Yet this framing was published in a year of relative optimism when Fukuyama first mooted his ‘end-of-history’ thesis.

It is noteworthy that Guattari opens his long essay by quoting Gregory Bateson:

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.

This idea that there is ‘an ecology of mind’ and indeed that there are (at least) three ecologies - mental, social and environmental - is already very clear in Gregory Bateson’s book Steps to An Ecology of Mind(1972). Guattari adds some political bite to Bateson’s epistemology, and places a greater emphasis on the capitalistic production of human subjectivity (something Harris, for instance, ignores) in an effort to create what he calls an ‘ethico-political ecosophy’.

The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet's surface…Political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues…they are generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethico-political articulation which I call ecosophy - between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions.

Guattari appeals to the need for three worlds, and I agree with him.

But of course, these are not quite the same three worlds as Popper or Harris (or indeed Perpsectiva, or Archer and Henriques below). For instance Guattari's emphasis on the interrelationship of ideas, practices, structures, systems, and habits co-arising as ‘assemblages’, and from that perspective the distinction between nature and culture breaks down. Moreover, while the notion of a mental ecology is close to Popper’s World 2, and the environmental ecology is close (in some ways) to World 1, Guattari’s ‘social relations’ is about subjectivity and the ‘existential territories’ that create it; that is a very different register from Popper’s inter-objective world where reason and creativity are given institutional support to prevail and endure. Nonetheless, given their different disciplinary starting points I see a striking degree of overlap.

Margaret Archer’s Morphogenesis: Structure, Culture and Agency.

The morphogenetic approach shows that structure and culture shape agency, but it is agency that transforms structure and culture.
- Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, 1995

Margaret Archer was a much admired British sociologist and social theorist (1943–2023) who recently passed away. She was known for her work on structure, culture, and agency within the framework of critical realism and for developing a morphogenetic (roughly, creation of form) perspective on social change, which explains the interaction of different kinds of influence on society at different time scales. (Structure, agency and culture correspond loosely to systems, souls and society respectively).

Margaret Archer and friend. Retrieved from Critical Theory Network.

We can see Margaret Archer there in the photograph with a friend, but her ‘enemy’ is structuration theory, particularly as articulated by Anthony Giddens who argued that structure and agency are co-constituted. She is keen to establish ‘analytical dualism’ between structure and agency to indicate how structure constrains agency, how agency shapes structure, and how culture informs the experience of constraint and the extent to which it is resisted; all of which, in turn, shapes our sense of and capacity for agency. Structures shape people's material conditions, but culture determines how they interpret and react to those conditions. Culture influences whether people accept, resist, or seek to change structural constraints. For Archer, Culture has its own reality distinct from structure and agency, and in this sense, there are overlaps with Popper’s World 3.

Cultural systems are relatively autonomous from social structures; they exert their own influence and must be treated as analytically distinct if we are to understand social change.
- Culture and Agency, 1988

One value of Archer’s threesome is that it speaks to timing. Social, economic and political structures are malleable, but in non-revolutionary conditions, they take a long time to change. Culture can change relatively quickly but still in the mid-term; and agency can shape things in the short term but mostly it can only gradually influence bigger changes in culture and structure, though that depends on the extent to which the agency is organised, mobolised and focussed.

If you are not a social theorist, and I am not really, perhaps the main thing to take away from Archer is the way she contextualises and foregrounds agency:

"Social reality is a process; structures precondition actions, but it is human agency that determines whether structures persist or change."
- Realist Social Theory, 1995

Archer’s emphasis on Agency is distinct here, but there is some consonance with Popper’s World 2, Perspectiva’s Souls, and Guattari’s Mental Ecology. Archer’s emphasis on agency’s power over structure also reminds me of Ursula le Guin’s line:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Gregg Henriques’s Metapsychology: the tree, the coin and the garden.

Finally, in the present day, there is a figure familiar to the liminal web, Gregg Henriques, Professor at James Madison University, who has created a model featuring some fundamental threeness that amounts to “The Unified Theory of Knowledge” or UTOK. I don’t sense any enemy motivating Gregg’s work - he comes across as a friendly guy who is generous in spirit and he has always been kind to me. But he is trying to solve a problem with his model and that is (primarily) ‘the problem of psychology’: there is no agreement on what the subject matter of psychology should be - is it a science of behaviour or a therapeutic practice to help us live a good life (whatever that is) or something in between?

Not everyone agrees the problem of psychology is problematic, and Bayo Akomalafe for instance has indicated that sometimes our problem lies precisely in our attempt to solve a problem. Any solution is rarely an end point, and usually creates a new kind of problem. There are similar issues with the lack of a clear object of inquiry in many other disciplines - do Sociologists agree on what society means (consider the divergence in Harris, Guattari and Archer above; all of whom are sociology adjacent). There are other examples (economics, theology, philosophy) but the problem of psychology is arguably a little different because, as Gregg puts it, “psychology is where the conceptual softness of natural science begins”. I am not even sure that is true because Physics for instance deals with matter and energy but neither can easily be defined. But Psychology deals with human interiority as it manifests in the exterior and relational world, so that “conceptual softness” calls into question the legitimacy of a subject based on inferences between different kinds of world, and all that flows from it in terms of strength of evidence and quality of intervention (i.e. What makes you think I should lie on this couch? Why should I tell you about my childhood? Are you sure I can’t eat the marshmallow now and go on to live a great life later?) Gregg believes he has solved the problem of psychology by outflanking it with a comprehensive onto-epistemological framework that applies beyond psychology.

I have known of Gregg’s work for a while, but only recently bought his book UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge, published by Sky Meadow Press. I was struck that on the very first page of the first chapter, there is a mention of a book by Donald Davison (which I had never heard of, despite studying Davidson as an undergraduate) called Subjective, Intersubjective and Objective (2001) where he states:

I want, first of all, to stress the apparent oddity of the fact that we have three irreducibly different varieties of empirical knowledge (ie the subjective, the objective, and the intersubjective). We need a overall picture which not only accommodates all three modes of knowing, but makes sense of their relations to each other. Without such a general picture we should be deeply puzzled that the same world is known to us in three such different ways.

Gregg begins the book there because that is what he has set out to do, and what he believes he has achieved. He deals with the objective world through his ‘tree of knowledge system’, the subjective world through his Iquad coin, and the intersubjective world through his UTOK Garden. (I confess, I’m still a bit confused about why he chose a coin to represent subjective states, even after reading about it). I have noticed the UTOK story evolving even in recent years but I believe in its current state it looks something like this:

Retrieved from UTOK’s Three Philosophical Pillars (2023)

I won’t explain the diagram, which is mostly self-explanatory, but the injunction described on the back of the book as a ‘mantra’ is “Marry the Coin to the Tree in the Garden under God” which I think is a way of saying that there are lots of kinds of things in the world and they can all be known, but they have to be known differently and there is a legitimacy to that way of knowing which the framework is there to elucidate.¹

What I want to say now is delicate and risks offending Gregg and his many fans, which is not my intention. However, there is a reason that I began this series with an open question about what metaphysics is and is for, and a reflection on maps and territories, and both feel relevant now.

Let me put it like this: I admire Gregg’s work and I like him, but I don’t vibe with his framework.

My intellect can see the extraordinary effort, diligence, insight and dharmic tenacity required to do the work that was clearly his to do - to see someone labouring on the task life has set for them is always admirable and often a model of what maturation and fulfilment looks like. However, I also have a viscerally negative aesthetic reaction to it. I feel, rather than think, that a framework like this is as much part of the world’s problems as it is part of any ‘solution’.

Why would I say such a thing?

Maybe it’s professional envy. Perhaps Gregg’s comprehensive vision of being and knowing replete with images and metaphors is too close to what I set out to do when I co-created an organisation premised on threeness almost a decade ago (Perspectiva’s official name is Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society). And maybe the fact that Gregg has fleshed out his framework, and I haven’t, creates some intellectual ressentiment that makes it painful to look at it, and now here I am acting out like a child throwing toys out of a pram saying: “I don’t like it. I don’t want it.”

Maybe, but here’s another possibility: When I wrote Tasting the Pickle as my Covid-survival project in 2020 I described my essay and the table that reflected its main elements as “the last cigarette of a cartological hedonist”. I felt I was done with intellectual map-making as a premise for societal transformation, and I still feel that way today.² Yet I can say that for about five years now my intellect has felt free of the compulsion to describe the world cartologically; emotionally, psychologically and spiritually I am in a very different place. That same feeling extends to seeing metacrisis as a term we use to get beyond crisis thinking.

I am all for intellectual frameworks, I love good theoretical models - UTOK is one of them. I believe in wide-boundaried thinking which means I have an appetite for maps and models that might appear over-elaborate, but are perhaps just necessarily complex. The Swiss prophet Jean Gebser might be right that the mental/rational structure of consciousness is in its deficient mode, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need mental models or rationality. It does mean however - and I think this is what I am feeling - that we need to learn to see through the world, to develop (and I know that may not be the right word) what Gebser called ‘diaphanous awareness’ and a-perspectival knowing which does not mean thinking that is without perspective, but free from any particular perspective which suggests a kind of epistemic agility, seeing and knowing and thinking as a cosmic art form that is optimally responsive.

All of which is to say: it’s fine to bring a conceptual model into the room, but treat it as a guest you are excited to get to know who might help you to know yourself better, not as a landlord you have to justify yourself to in perpetuity.

A good map is a good tool but it is rarely a good lens, and it is definitely not an evolved, enacted, encultured, extended nervous system in a historical context. I think it’s our job as thinking and learning people to metabolise a variety of conceptual maps, but metabolising is the key, not reifying or oracularising (coinage!). Good frameworks like the ones we have considered here are nutritious intellectual food, and we should take them in. But what should happen then, I think, is a process of conceptual sublimation whereby the models become like digested food that manifests as energy that our bodies need to dance and it becomes part of our perceptual orientation and arises as trace elements that are integrated into our enactive dispositions; it is through those dispositions - how we are ready, willing and able to act - that we intuitively and spontaneously respond to the world as we find it, as it find us.

I am slightly (and perhaps unreasonably) triggered by Gregg’s framework because it is ultimately a descriptive ontology. The model is useful on its terms, but I see it as a kind of conceptual idolatry at a time when we need to get better at creating generative ontologies. There is a risk of cartology becoming cartophilia and then, imperceptibly, cartosclerosis sets in, and before we know it we are lost inside the map.

Descriptive ontologies focus on cataloguing, classifying, and analyzing existing entities and relationships. Generative ontologies seek to produce new realities. Both are required, and the former can even be a kind of training for the latter.³

A descriptive ontology says: this is how things are, we can see the world through it.

A generative ontology says (or rather enacts, enables, instantiates…): In light of how the world presents itself to us at the moment, here is how we can think of things, here, now, and for the purposes at hand (informed in some cases by years of metabolising descriptive ontologies). Generative ontologies are closely related to moral imagination which I have described before as perhaps being a sine qua non for the peaceful resolution of conflict. We have to see anew.

Coming back to Archer for a moment, we might say that while institutional structures are slow to change, descriptive ontologies are more like culture while generative ontologies are more like agency. And it’s complex as always. ‘Systems, souls, and society’ feels like a generative ontology in our still rather materialist culture and for some spiritual-bypassing sub-cultures, because it is trying to shape reality and change the conversation. And yet a critic could say it’s a descriptive ontology like any other. And that would be ok, because nobody should feel status anxiety about their ontology.

Part of the challenge is that it feels like ontology and epistemology are not really where it’s at. While we need to be aware of them, perhaps they are not really quite the solid ground we are looking for, and can’t ever be. Maybe the challenge is deeper and even more difficult, not with knowledge and truth as much as with beauty and goodness. What if the world’s heart is breaking and we all have to break with it? What if the very idea of territory makes no sense, and our only maps are in the granularity of the pieces of wood that have become our liferafts at sea?

I’ll try to get to that next time.

Yours Aye,

Jonathan.

---

Full Series:

The Threeness of the World 1

The Threeness of the World 2

The Threeness of the World 3

The Threeness of the World 4

The Threeness of the World 5

The Threeness of the World 6

1. At the moment I’m mostly interested in what is not there, which is Gregg’s depiction of a continuation of the ‘joint points’ between major phase transitions from matter to life to mind to culture in a ‘fifth joint point’ that we may be living through now. As many have argued, this may not just be a choppy news cycle, but something like a geo-techno-world-historical transition (see five flavours of betweenness - the coincidence of five is just a coincidence…or is it?). In Gregg’s model, that means a further transition from culture/person to digital/global (perhaps dressed in purple) which chimes with theories relating to planetisation, ‘time between worlds’, a new axial age and so on. Gregg’s model definitely helps to contextualise that transition.

2. Of course, as anyone who has read Richard Klein’s wonderful book Cigarettes are Sublime will know, the last cigarette is often a subtle way ensuring the habit continues, so I reserve the right to create fabulous intellectual maps in future.

3. I am half-joking, but even a hunter-gathering nomad would have an elaborate classification system for, say, types of berry, which could be useful if rushing through bushy terrain and feeling peckish while being hunted by a tiger.